


His Best

by hewwow (nonworth)



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: ? - Freeform, Angst, Emotional/Psychological Abuse, Existential Crisis, Hanzo being sad, M/M, Others Mentioned - Freeform, Suicide, mentions of physical abuse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-17
Updated: 2019-09-17
Packaged: 2020-10-20 09:13:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,149
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20672906
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nonworth/pseuds/hewwow
Summary: There's only so much one can do as a human.For Hanzo, his best led to his demise.





	His Best

**Author's Note:**

> It's sad Hanzo hour again boys  
I'm not projecting you are
> 
> Unbetaed because that's how it be  
I'm hoping that I got most of the tags that apply to this fic but I'm also slightly delirious atm so please let me know if you think anything should be added to the list!

There’s only so much one can do as a human.

Hanzo had tried his best his entire life—though, most may argue that he didn’t.

Since he was born, his destiny was decided for him. He was torn from his mother’s warmth as soon as he could walk, raised by the cold hands of the family servants, and therefore didn’t know what maternal love was like.

His father was frigid; crying was never tolerated (though he realized at a young age that it was pointless anyway—no one came to his side no matter how much he wailed, and it only served to exhaust him), asking for help was asking for a strike, self-discipline was all that he needed to think about.

Misdeeds, weakness, indulgence—none would be forgiven.

Now that he thought about it, Sojiro had a funny way of controlling him—he supposed it could be roughly compared to Stockholm Syndrome. He would hit, spit words of poison, and punish, but occasionally, he granted Hanzo one praise.

When Hanzo shook and trembled after his first kill, Sojiro made sure he burned the image of the decimated corpse into his brain, roughly holding his head in place by the chin, all the while whispering words of approval.

_“You are truly a son I can be proud of. Prodigy not only in tactics, but in weaponry, in the art of assassination? What more could a father ask for? You will be a great leader—_you _will lead us to greatness.”_

He supposed that the fact he didn’t see anyone outside of the Shimada family didn’t help him develop the image of a normal family.

Once, he asked why his mother cooed over Genji, and why Sojiro’s gaze softened when he looked at the younger brother, and for a moment, his father’s cold expression crumbled. For just a second, Hanzo saw someone he didn’t recognize, and he wondered about the odd pang in his heart before his cheek burst into stinging heat. He was dismissed to his room for the rest of the day.

Genji… Genji was so different from what his father wanted from Hanzo. Genji was allowed to laugh and act in the most boisterous manners. He ran through the carefully arranged sand gardens without a care, and more often than not he overheard the servants talk with more fondness than he had ever gotten out of them. Hanzo’s birthdays were celebrated with a grand dinner with all the heads of the branching families—a stiff, formal event that made Hanzo dread his own birthday. His gifts were the renewed vows of loyalty from them. Genji was allowed a beautifully crafted strawberry shortcake, soft smiles from his mother, a set of customized shurikens that he had been _begging _for from his father.

Genji always offered him a slice of the cake. Hanzo always savored the look of pride he received from his father when he refused it.

(When Genji was a teen and rebellious, he had snuck one into Hanzo’s room and urged him to taste it, just a little bit—though the sweetness was overwhelming at first, it was nothing like the _manjuu _and other _kashi _that he’s had before. He didn’t realize he had been crying tears of frustration until Genji pointed it out, after which he had shoved him out with the plate of barely-eaten cake. He hadn’t had it since.)

His younger brother was so different from him; he was crass, obnoxious, but kind. He was the only one who could make Hanzo smile without meaning to, and the only one who shook up his rather stable world. When he came home after secretly dyeing his hair bright green, and with piercings in his ears, of course he yelled at him. Called him names, uttered words that he should not have. Even outside of that particular event, arguing was all that happened between the two after Hanzo’s formal training for the leadership position began. Perhaps that’s what Zenyatta would now call a “coping mechanism”—truthfully, Hanzo had begun to become jealous, and craved the freedom Genji had.

“Like a sparrow,” his father had said once when Hanzo off-handedly mentioned the younger Shimada’s nightly outings.

Once, he gazed at the paintings on the walls and then the cherry blossoms around the castle, and accompanied by the bravery that had appeared out of nowhere, he picked up a brush and a cup of water to create an ink painting.

It was the first act of self-expression he allowed himself without getting Sojiro’s permission.

His brush was snapped in half and the painting was torn apart once he was discovered, and he had not tried painting since.

Hanzo tried to imagine what it would have been like if he had given into his brother’s urges and joined him on his whims. He failed to imagine anything other than his father’s fiery eyes and equally burning words.

He simply gave up at that point, knowing that anything other than the clan affairs would not be accepted in his life—painting was pointless anyway.

His existence was for the clan—to make his father proud, to lead the Shimada to even greater heights.

The pressure grew when his father passed.

So when he struck down his brother with the only gift he received from his father, he thought he was doing the right thing.

_Genji is a liability, a threat, an unneeded existence--…_

He had only realized that perhaps, what he had lived for wasn’t the _correct path _when he couldn’t look away from his brother’s lifeless body lying in the blood. _Perhaps _what he learned in the clan wasn’t as great as he had been led to believe.

He wondered what the point of anything was while he let out a scream at the white-hot pain on his right shoulder, where a new scar of his family’s crest rested.

The castle was silent. It was never silent, not with Genji running around, not with his father’s bellows echoing down the corridor, not with the servants playfully arguing with his brother—…

But it was silent.

Hanzo felt as if he was going insane. Always the same scenery, always the same training, meeting, killing, but in silence, not a single grain of sand out of place in the sand garden…

And he wondered if his entire existence was a mistake. In his confusion, he ran.

For ten years, he wandered, observing and taking in so much of the world that he had not known about. He saw families celebrating holidays, reveled in the different appearances and mannerisms of people around the world, got overwhelmed from the sight of so many emotions that they all expressed.

He wondered if he had somehow adopted their mannerisms, when Genji proved himself alive and he felt a deep sense of _relief. _

And of course, what was a man without purpose in life to do when offered a chance to truly change himself? He followed Genji to Overwatch, where he met an even more ragtag bunch of soldiers than he had expected.

They were rightfully hostile at first—the scathing words were crudely familiar, and he took comfort in them. But they were not Sojiro—over time they started to greet him, smiled at him, praised him endlessly.

He had even discovered this confusing thing with the cowboy, where he found himself comfortable enough to release the years of pent up confusion and anger in front of him, leaning into the warmth of the arm slung over his shoulder. He didn’t quite know how to respond when McCree had tentatively asked him to further their relationship and quite rightly panicked at the sudden fluttering of his heart, but a month after a heated argument with a frustrated Genji, he agreed to McCree’s proposition.

He found himself _enjoying _his time around these people—people who he would have wrinkled his nose at if he had been any younger. He learned much from them, enough to satiate most of his curiosities.

Yet when he glanced at himself in the mirror, he wondered why he could never feel satisfied. He had everything he had envied of his brother, even a lover who he almost died for and who had almost died for him in return. Said brother had returned from the dead, and worked daily to reassure him that he had indeed forgiven him. He no longer flinched and hid his smiles, nor his tears, yet there was a void in his heart that he could not fill no matter what method. He began to doubt.

If the Shimada clan, the entire purpose of his existence, was false, who was to say that this group was true?

Doubt grew and grew until he simply got up and left, leaving behind only a note that explained the purpose of his impromptu journey.

He avoided them when they searched for him in cities that he traveled to, though they seemed to stop this once he had been caught by McCree in Greece. They talked for a long time, and came to a mutual agreement of the situation.

“One year,” Hanzo had murmured. “I am giving myself one year to sort things out. I want to experience what I could not as a child—freedom. I want to take a break from killing—you of all people should understand, Jesse. It is _exhausting_.”

“And what comes after that year?” McCree said through the cigar smoke that drifted out between his lips.

A pause. “I do not know. But I will let you know.”

After a promise of weekly letters, they went their separate ways. Hanzo kept his word, week after week sent a lengthy letter that would find their ways to a shoebox McCree kept hidden under his bed.

And just as he had said to McCree, he indulged himself as much as possible in the one year. He abandoned his kyudo-gi for jeans, baggy jacket, and regular pair of boots. He couldn’t quite find it in himself to dye his hair, but he did take the stylist’s recommendation and settled with an undercut. Later, he experimented with piercings. If Sojiro could see him now, he would have absolutely been obliterated in the midst of his rage.

He allowed himself any and all food that he wished to try. Though he found himself several favorites, strawberry shortcakes served to be his bittersweet number one.

He bought himself a small sketchpad and a pencil, and sketched anything and everything he wished to.

And despite all this—_despite _fulfilling all his wishes, he still felt that void. It felt as if he was still living in a lie, as if this was all just a dream that he would wake from at any moment. Dread lay thick in the pits of his stomach, as did guilt. Everything he did, he did to spite his father, yet he could not bring himself to ignore the harsh words and phantom pains that came with indulging himself.

Then, quick as blink of an eye, one year passed.

He snapped a quick photo of the castle with a small, disposable camera he had gotten on a whim—it was spring now, and the cherry blossoms were in full bloom all around. Quite the spectacle—yet not quite what he wanted to send back to Gibraltar.

While pondering his options at the top-most point of the castle, he finally decided. He stood, and took the photo of the rest of Japan laying beneath the cliff the castle rested on—tall skyscrapers hidden in thin veils of fog, neon lights trying to break through. The idea of life thriving beneath concealment—it appealed to him greatly.

When the sun began to set, he went off to print the photo and drop off both the photo and the letter in the post office.

In the end, he wasn’t able to achieve anything except try to conceal the hurt he had. He spoke words of superiority, but he knew that it was merely a way to distract himself from his own incompetence. Most of his laughter was carefully calculated, and different reactions for different situations were learned. But wasn’t that how he had also been like in the clan? Most of all, he hated himself for doubting the people who had shown so much kindness to him. He wanted to trust them, but with that would come yet another animal.

It was selfish, what he was going to do. Or perhaps, everything he had been doing up to this point was selfish.

The word echoed in his head as he watched the sun rise from the same perch he had been on the previous day.

He allowed himself few more tears, but smiled as he breathed in the flowery air of Hanamura.

He tilted forward, and lavished in the cold air as he plummeted down into the midst of the mist.


End file.
